People We Hear About

New Zealand Tablet, 18 September 1913, Page 41

People We Hear About

Madame de Navarro, remembered by stage-lovers by her maiden name, Mary Anderson, celebrated her fifty-fourth birthday on July 28. She was born in California in 1859, began stage life at sixteen, retired at the height of her popularity in 1889', and published her reminiscences in 1896.

Lieut. -Col. the Hon. George Henry Morris, the new Commanding Officer of the Irish Guards, is a Catholic of note. He is a younger brother of Lord Killanin and an old Oratory school boy, and was posted as Major to the Irish Guards soon after the formation of the regiment, which is almost entirely Catholic.

Cardinal Bourne, the Duke of Norfolk, and Lord Edmund Talbot were among the distinguished personages who were present at the King’s garden party at Buckingham Palace recently, when a large body of teachers were entertained, among them being a number of nuns, with whom the King and Queen conversed.

As 125 old Eton boys, beginning with the Hon. and Rev. George Ignatius Spencer, have become Catholics, the converted Etonians recently held in London their first annual dinner. Monsignor Benson, Monsignor Barnes, and Mr. Shane Leslie made amusing speeches. The latter said that ‘ he owed as much as any to Eton. One of the dames there had once given him the Pange Lingua and whispered to him there were more sacraments than two. This and confirmation in Orange Ulster opened the road to Rome. He felt that the destiny of their Society was to effect the canonisation of Henry VI., their founder, whose relics had been recently disinterred in the presence of the Provosts of Eton and King’s.’

A celebrated Catholic journalist, Mr. C. E. A. W. Jerningham, is one of the new Justices of the Peace for London. Mr. Jerningham, who for over a score of years wrote the. ‘ Letter from the Linkman ’ in Truth, under the pseudonym of ‘ Marmaduke,’ probably knows more of the inner doings of Mayfair and the smaller influences which have shaped great political and social events in London than anyone else. He was born in the year 1854, and was educated at Beaumont and Stonyhurst. At the latter he was some time Senior Philosopher. Mr. Jerningham is a most versatile man, having founded, for instance, the Art Collectors’ Protection Association, and helped to found the Self-Help Emigration Society.

Mr. Hilaire Belloc, who was forty-three on Sunday, July 27, belongs to that remarkable group of young Oxford men who were at the University some twenty years ago, and the most prominent of whom to-day are Mr. F. E. Smith, Sir John Simon, Mr. F. W. Hirst (the editor of the Economist and Mr. E. G. Hemmerde. Mr. Belloc’s father was a French barrister, but his mother was an English lady and a descendant of Dr. Joseph Priestley. For four years, from 1906 to 1910, Mr. Belloc represented the constituency of South Salford in the 'Liberal interest in the .House of Commons, but he has latterly forsaken this participation in the activity of party politics in order to become the head of the modern side of the East London College.

At the Pan-Celtic Congress at the Ghent International Exhibition, over which Lord Ashbourne, the new Catholic peer, presided, a paper written by the Right Rev. Mgr. Fahey, P.P., Gort, County Galway, was read by Mr. J. de Courcey Mac Donnell, the secretary of the Congress. It related to early Irish art, and the writer traced its growth from' the monasteries and schools of ancient Ireland, and referred in detail to the various Celtic designs in spiral and interlaced work. He dealt with the splendid work of the Irish* scribes and illuminators, and referred to the famous Book of Kells and other artistic Irish manuscripts, which work, he said, was unequalled in any other part of, the worlcf for its wealth of coloring and its wonderful delicacy, accuracy, and excellence of design. . ,